


A Shameful Condition

by Rebness



Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-20
Updated: 2013-01-20
Packaged: 2017-11-26 04:58:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/646819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rebness/pseuds/Rebness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis, a relic himself, rails against modernism but hasn't counted on a child's book being his undoing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Shameful Condition

As with everything else about this wretched new century, things grew a little ugly. The 1940s didn't suit Louis, not really. He felt truly out of place in a decade where the Manhattan Project, tupperware and commerical television were the greatest achievements of his country.   
  
But what was the alternative? Flee to Europe, where the worst problem wasn't crassness but poverty, and razed cities, and ugly, ugly memories?

  
He firmly believed in adapting with the times - no sense in trying to mummify oneself as a remnant of things past, like those hapless creatures of the Theatre des Vampires - and he embraced sportswear and tee-shirts and all those other things that Lestat would have gladly pummelled him over. There was nothing elegant about the clothing. There was nothing elegant about the period. How Lestat would hate it!   
  
How Louis should have loved it.   
  
He hated himself for his materialism (Thoreau said: _most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind_ ) and he knew that it wasn't in keeping with the spirit of the age to be so theatrically wealthy, but he sometimes booked himself in to the grandest hotels, old palaces where the floorboards squeaked and chandeliers sparkled overhead.   
  
He sought out other French-speakers, though they tended to drone on about the new world order and mocked his provinicial accent. He read back through the classics, abandoning Eliot and Orwell and Mitford for Dumas' descriptions of lace and carriages, ladies who fainted and men who looked dashingly at them over their cravats.   
  
It was absurd, he knew it. He simply had to move on or he'd be swallowed up by this ugly world before he knew it. He'd be Armand, looking with sad uncertainty at the people around him, lost.   
  
Out of desperation, he turned to childrens' literature, looking for something ineffable he didn't find in the knowing, raw bestsellers at the bookstore. He'd heard of _The Little Prince_ , of course, but it seemed very silly and emotionally manipulative (he suspected that the Anglophone world liked to imagine something deep and important in anything French, and he further suspected that he was a little flattered). He forced himself to read it.   
  
There were so many stupid little things in it he wished he could have read to Claudia. That hurt, deeply. He wished he could have quoted to her the line about seeing with the heart clearly. He wondered if Armand would have quoted at him the line: _You're beautiful, but you're empty. No one could die for you._ He would have agreed with him.   
  
He skipped the part about the alcoholic, and rolled his eyes at the king. He liked the fox, though he had never had much time for animals, save his horses. Its desperate, unconditional love charmed him. Modernism had given his voice to his perplexed soul as the landscape was flattened and smoky edifices rose and didn't fall; he read this new literature compulsively.   
  
So what to make of a book which dealt with longing for a person rather than an era? He wasn't sure. He'd put it out of his mind, but of course he was so good at self-flagellating, and the fox was Claudia's initial simplistic love for him, and then her unhappy longing, and the fox was the stolen glances from Lestat, and Lestat reaching a hand to him and begging for his help even as his throat spurted blood from the wicked cut.   
  
The fox was never himself. He was too cynical and changed, and the victim of his own passivity, and of course he'd never been loyal enough to Lestat, who he abandoned for Claudia, or to Claudia, whom he abandoned for Armand, and as for Armand -- well. " _I never wished you any sort of harm, but you wanted me to tame you_."   
  
He finished the book, disliked the ending, returned to unpoetic Hemingway, colourful Williams and unhappy Eliot. But he was ever so good at self-flagellating, and really, how indulgent it was to return again and again:   
  
“ _You have hair like the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat_ …”  
  
He wandered the city, choking in the smog, grateful for Anglo-Saxon ugliness in towering edificies and urban tongues. No delicate ironwork balconies here or sultry accented French whispered in his ear. He lost himself in the city and gloried in their shared fall. And it was really very lovely to think, and to doze, and marvel as the night revealed the thousand sordid things of which his soul was constituted.


End file.
